Absolutely had enough at work (local authority) and being asked to complete stonewall survey has tipped me over the edge. Please can you wonderful people review my letter before I send it (or talk me down!)?
Dear Sirs,
Having recently been invited as an employee of XX to complete a Stonewall survey about LGBT+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans) equality at XX and particularly by the following statement;
“We are proud to be a Stonewall Diversity Champion and are always looking for ways that we can make our organisation more inclusive for our employees, residents, visitors and partners.”
I felt compelled to write to you to suggest that XX’s membership of the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme should be reviewed. I fully support the rights of transgender people, yet being associated with Stonewall lies in tension with one of the Council’s core behaviours of respect, respect for the rights of all employees, residents, visitors and partners, including women.
I believe that sex matters.
I believe that in our patriarchal society it is women’s sexed bodies and their role in sex and reproduction that play a major role in their oppression. Gender identity (the feeling of being a man or a woman regardless of one’s biological sex) can therefore never wholly replace sex as a protected characteristic in equalities law and women have the right to organise on the basis of their sex and to access single-sex spaces.
The belief that sex is biological and immutable, people cannot change their sex and that sex is distinct from gender-identity has been established in law as a philosophical belief protected from discrimination under section 10 of the Equality Act 2010 via numerous recent legal cases such as those bought by Maya Forestater, Alison Bailey and David Grainger. The case of Forstater v CGD Europe explicitly stated that Ms Forstater’s beliefs did not “seek to destroy the rights of trans persons”.
Nancy Kelley, CEO of Stonewall until Jul 2023, has likened these ‘gender critical’ beliefs to anti-Semitism. The motivation for this comparison is to justify Stonewall’s longstanding policy demanding ‘no debate’ on transgender issues.
In 2017, Stonewall declared a lobbying agenda for a radical change the in law to allow people to change their recognised sex through ‘a simple administrative process’. It has also called for changes to the Equality Act 2010 to remove the protected characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’, to replace it with ‘gender identity’ and to remove all instances of permitted discrimination (the ‘exceptions’) against trans-identified people.
Other views that Stonewall appears to regard as hateful include the belief that there should be restrictions on biological males competing in women’s sports, that lesbians can define their attraction as same-sex, not same-gender, and the high court’s view that children cannot meaningfully consent to taking puberty blockers.
The Reindorf Review for the University of Essex (published May 2021) found that policies reflecting Stonewall guidance were not in line with the Equality Act and contributed to an environment of fear for staff holding dissenting views about sex and gender.
In her review, Barrister Akua Reindorf writes “In my view the policy states the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is”.
Two cabinet ministers for Woman and Equalities have now called for the withdrawal of government departments from Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme, including the current incumbent Kemi Badenoch.
High-profile public-sector bodies disassociated from Stonewall’s Diversity Champion programme, include the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the House of Commons, UCL, the University of Winchester the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, ACAS (the employment dispute service) and Social Work England.
Stonewall is a lobby group which aims to achieve policy change and it is entitled to campaign towards this end. But it is inappropriate that such a group should be embedded within XX.
If members consider it appropriate to continue the relationship with Stonewall, there must be a strategy developed to counter drawbacks described above and ensure those who hold gender critical beliefs do not feel excluded, and are protected from discrimination or harassment.